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Hedge fund managers like David Einhorn, Dan Loeb, or Carl Icahn became billionaires through reaping large profits for their investors, which is why piggybacking their stock picks may provide us with significant returns as well. Many hedge funds, like Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, are pretty secretive, but we can still get some insights by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings. One of the most fertile grounds for large abnormal returns is hedge funds’ most popular small-cap picks, which are not so widely followed and often trade at a discount to their intrinsic value. In this article we will check out hedge fund activity in another small-cap stock: Enova International Inc (NYSE:ENVA).

Is Enova International Inc (NYSE:ENVA) a buy, sell, or hold? Prominent investors are getting more optimistic. The number of long hedge fund bets inched up by 3 recently. At the end of this article we will also compare ENVA to other stocks including Hawaiian Telcom HoldCo Inc (NASDAQ:HCOM), HENNESS CAPITAL ACQUISITION CORP II (NASDAQ:HCAC), and MediciNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:MNOV) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

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How have hedgies been trading Enova International Inc (NYSE:ENVA)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, an increase of 17% from one quarter earlier. Hedge fund ownership of the stock has trended up throughout the last year, rising by over 50% during that time. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Phil Frohlich’s Prescott Group Capital Management has the biggest position in Enova International Inc (NYSE:ENVA), worth close to $18.9 million, comprising 4% of its total 13F portfolio. On Prescott Group Capital Management’s heels is Empyrean Capital Partners, led by Michael A. Price and Amos Meron, holding a $13.5 million position. Remaining professional money managers that hold long positions include Ari Zweiman’s 683 Capital Partners, Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates and Joe Huber’s Huber Capital Management.